Prologue

Fear was not something she felt often. On normal circumstances she pushed it so deep within herself that it became nonexistent. Fear turned to pressured pain that filled up her dead heart and pushed hard against the fleshy walls. Fear was an unforgivable emotion because fear was equivalent to weakness. Weakness was not even a part of her vocabulary let alone something she put out. Fear however had a way of creeping back into her life, escaping the confines of her heart and dripping it oily life all over her insides until she was rattling and slick with it. Fear was something that seeped out of her in the night when everyone else slept. Fear had a face that wore a crown. A crown she was married too.

Her small body trembled beneath that heavy covers adorning the massive bed she lay in. This broken body of hers was trained by the beatings it took to know that now it should tremble. Soon it would take a beating from thick palms and hard knuckles and her little body was futile to stop it. Come morning new bruises would lie beneath her olive skin and mingle with older, yet still painfully present, marks. Marks left by a belligerent husband who sought out her body for his own needs and left her lying in the bed, trembling and bloody. Oh yes, this body feared while it waited for the pain that was going to envelop it very soon.

Footsteps echoed outside the door. Each foot fall sent her heart racing just a bit faster and her blood to turned to ice. The sudden chill within her bones only amplified her shaking and made her previous sweat a cold one. Her lips parted slightly for a breathless scream to escape. Her slender fingers clutched the duvet tighter to her bare chest. The wide, fear blown eyes set in her skull tripled in size as she watched the door. When the footsteps stilled and silence befell her ears, she slammed her eyes shut. She didn't want to see his entrance. She simply couldn't. Metal rings jingled. Poorly treated hinges screeched in protest. Wood slapped against stone wall. Then his footsteps reappeared and continued until they came to a stop beside her.

Her eyes cracked open to take in the form of the King towering above her. Though it was dark she could see the red tinge in cheeks that the heat of the alcohol swirling around his veins had left behind. Like his soul, his eyes were dark and hungry. His sloppy, greasy hair stuck out in every which way beneath the shimmering circlet of gold atop his proud head. He stared down at her over the bulge of his hooked nose, his chapped and unattractive lips pulled into a tight sneer. He reeked of what he drank and what he smoked. Even the scraggly patches of coarse hair growing from his jaw and above his lip held signs of his indulges, beads of ale still clinging to his whiskers and bits of tobacco colored spittle stuck in the finer hair below his lips. Everything about him disgusted her. She drew her eyes from him to the ground under his muddied boots. She saw herself as a proud, strong woman but this man alone held a power over her strong enough to turn her submissive. Perhaps it was the many beatings she had undergone in the 2 years she had spent tied to him through marriage.

"Undress me." His voice was rough like his touch and cold as her blood. She knew that in the dark he wouldn't see the scathing glare she sent him as her tiny act of defiance just before she slipped off the bed onto her knees before him. Quickly she unlaced his boots with her trembling fingers and pulled them from his stinking feet. They were thrown away without care, making a loud noise when they hit the floor some ways away. Loud noises like that bothered him and it was something she knew so she wasn't surprised when she felt him slap her hard on the backside of her head as punishment. The force of the hit sent her head forward and she bashed her nose against his knees. Immediately warm blood began to steadily trickle from her nostrils, dripping onto the King's bare feet. He grunted in annoyance, jumping back from the Queen bowed before him gripping her nose in silence.

"Now look at what you've done," He growled, gesturing to the drops of her blood staining the paleness of his royal feet, "You're useless! Get on the bed."

Dutifully she did as told. She kept her eyes closed because she didn't need them open to know he was undressing himself. And she didn't need her eyes open to know when he had climbed onto the bed with her and mounted her. She felt it when the bed dipped from his weight and she felt the hair of his legs rub against her thighs and hips. This was always the worst part. This was the reason her body trembled every night, this was the source of her fear. Sometimes he would be to busy running a kingdom to partake of her body or to drunk to get himself up. Those were the nights she wept with joy. Tonight was a night she would weep not of joy but of the pain that would follow his finishing, of the bruises that would grow and the knot in her stomach that would tighten. Tonight she would lay beneath him and be the wife he had in mind when he asked her mother for permission to take her daughter as his bride. Not a partner in the absence of his late wife but rather something for his cock to fit into.

His meaty hands gripped her thighs tightly and jerked them open, making room for himself to sit between on his knees. Still she held her eyes closed. If she kept them closed she wouldn't have to see him, only feel him. Feeling something was much easier for her to pretend wasn't happening. With her eyes closed she could whisk herself away and pretend she was an adolescent who rode horses under the protective eye of her father long past. She could feel the sun warming her face as she stood in her saddle, she could feel the leather reins pressed against her palms and the wide smile lighting up her young face. She wasn't here pinned beneath his girth while he grunted in her ear but rather there, with her beautiful steed and happily unmarried.

Only when he finished and rolled off her did she let her brown eyes flutter open. His sweaty arm still lay draped across her chest in a way that she was sure he meant as a way of keeping her in her place. Both literally and figuratively. She just stared at the ceiling while she listening to his heavy breathing, his each outtake fanning across her neck and ear in an unsettling way. She felt like she was suffocating from his heat and his closeness. There was a burning between her legs that was as familiar as it was vile, left behind by him as it always was when he took from her that which she didn't offer. The burn, his arm, his breath, this marriage, it was all to much for her and she was asphyxiating. She needed out from under him, she needed away. Her eyes stared at the ceiling as she listening and she waited for those heavy, heavy breaths washing over her to steady out. When he sounded as though he was asleep she carefully turned her head to inspect his face. Even in his sleep he looked like her personal hell.

Carefully she moved from under him and tip toed towards her wardrobe in search of clothes. She didn't even care enough to wear something nice of hers. Fine linins, silks, embroidered with hefty and expensive jewels with inseams of gold and silver. She may be a trapped and desolate Queen on the inside but on the outside she looked every bit royal with the most beautiful and believably fake smile there was to behold. Normally she took pride in what she wore because her outfits where her only joy but here, in the night, she was frantic. Her fingers found fabric and she hastily threw it on, coating her body in thick layers to stop out the cold winds. She draped an oiled cloak across her shoulders, clicking the metal latch across her shoulder as quietly as she could. With one last glance at her husband she drew the hood up across her deep brown hair and turned on her foot to slip through the still open door. Without a sound she disappeared from the castle and the King's lands. In the morning alarms would sound and the King would send out many of his men to collect his Queen only to come back empty handed. They wouldn't find her. A month would pass by before the King declared that if anyone could find his Queen and bring her back to him then he would grant them a place in his court and give them more gold than they could carry for their troubles. It would be some more time before someone stepped forth with his Queen in hand to claim that prize. And it would be to everyone's surprise that, instead of a King's man or a Knight from another land, it would be a blond headed farm girl that delivered him his Queen.

Let me know if you liked it, there will be more to come.